Walter Channing: Sculptor, Vintner, Investor

The hands are one of the first things that grab you about Walter Channing. They look like they've been chiseled, hammered, splintered, perhaps caught by a chainsaw once or twice - certainly not the hands of your typical venture capitalist. They're sculptor's hands.

Though he spends his weeks in New York putting up the capital to start innovative health-care companies, Mr. Channing has remained true to his chief passion over the years. The evidence is scattered across the expanse of his property off Scuttlehole Road: a small forest of trees impaled into the ground, roots up, in one clearing; a futuristic set of fiberglass spheres in another corner, and, nearby, an immense cherry tree suspended upside down in midair.

Inside his sawdusted studio, strange tangles of roots and trunks wind their way into feminine forms, and more polished pieces hang from the walls.

Grapes, Too

Mr. Channing seemed a world apart from the corporate realms of finance and investment during a recent visit.

"It's such a passion of mine I just can't let it go," he said of sculpting. In fact, he has been doing it for more than 25 years.

Add vintner to Mr. Channing's resume as well. The sculptor-investor has been growing more than 20 acres of grapes on his property since the early '80s. Though most of the grapes have been grown to sell to local wineries, Mr. Channing has produced some wines from the vineyard and plans to release his own label, Channing Daughters, in the near future.

The name is a nod to Mr. Channing's four daughters, who range in age from 11 weeks to 17 years ("estrogen central" Mr. Channing affectionately calls his household, shared also by his wife, Molly).

One Hundred Acres

Though sculpture has been a deep-rooted interest (so to speak), the idea of growing grapes sprouted only after Mr. Channing purchased more than 100 acres in 1977. He had visited the Hamptons since the late 1960s.

"It became my goal to get some land at some point," Mr. Channing said. He eventually stumbled upon the perfect piece and purchased the land with a neighbor and fellow artist, Jack Youngerman. Over the years, the property has evolved into a sprawling palette of sorts for Mr. Channing's creative pursuits. The sculptures that dot the property are visible from Butter Lane, as is the vineyard. The freshman vintner has even thought about building a small winery on the property.

Potatoes were the original crop. Shortly after purchasing the land, Mr. Channing began leasing portions to local farmers. "We had some good tenants and some bad tenants," he said. Eventually, "it got to be too much work," he added, and the idea arose of farming the property himself.

The First Merlots

He chose grapes. Starting with a new tractor and 100 vines he bought from a North Fork winery, he established a small vineyard. The result was a half-success. The cabernet sauvignon vines which made up half the vineyard developed crown gall and died. The chardonnay grapes flourished, however, and their harvest resulted in some 20 cases of wine.

"That was the experiment," said Mr. Channing. Subsequent efforts turned the vineyard into a working one, and Mr. Channing began to sell the grapes. He introduced the first merlot grapes on the South Fork, which were first harvested in 1991 and sold to Le Reve.

In 1993, he began to focus on producing wine from the vineyard, and he has since contracted with Lenz and SagPond vineyards to produce it. He is in the process of securing permits to market Channing Daughters as its own label.

Interests Merged

Though the whole family pitches in at harvest time, Mr. Channing relies on hired help for the day-to-day management of the vineyard. One full-time job is quite enough.

He has headed a venture capital investing business for the past 15 years, and worked as a health-care consultant for 12 years before that. The two interests have shaped an investment fund focused on health-care related ventures.

"It involves basically creating a company from scratch to go after a certain market or to develop a certain product," he explained.

The fund's most recent venture involved a company developing sophisticated computer software to provide health care professionals with accurate models of patient behavior.

"Consulting is not that much fun," said Mr. Channing. "You're just telling other people what to do. When you're in venture capital, you put your money where your mouth is."

Chainsaw Advantage

Mr. Channing has been involved in the science realm since he graduated from Harvard University's Business School and went to work with computers at the Honeywell Corporation. "It was the very early days of the computer age," he said.

The move from his native Massachusetts to New York City helped inspire an interest in sculpting, although growing up with a mother who painted and a father who worked with wood also helped.

"I always loved wood. Growing up, I had a tree surgery business," he said.

That summer job turned out to have an unexpected value. At his freshman admissions interview at Harvard, the nervous applicant was surprised to find his interviewer as interested in chainsaws as academics.

"In my day the interview was like a third of the admissions process. . .he looked and saw I had a tree surgery business and it turned out he wanted to buy a chainsaw. So we started talking about chainsaws for the rest of the interview."

It was shock, he said, to move to New York after living most of his life in a wooded area. No trees and chainsaws here.

"I had no idea what it was like to live in a dense city," he said. "There was this funny feeling of claustrophobia."

He began to tinker with woodworking to reclaim some feeling of the outdoors. The small Black and Decker arm saw he hooked up in his apartment helped, though his neighbors weren't so supportive.

Then an extraordinary opportunity came along. From his office on Rector Street in the financial district he noticed the city ripping up the old Pier 14. Thousands of pounds of well-preserved yellow pine was coming out of the water and being hauled off.

"I found out they were taking everything out to sea on barges and burning it," Mr. Channing recalled. "It made me crazy because it was good wood. That's when I started to hoard wood. People thought I was crazy."

Giant Pencils

With a basement full of timbers he salvaged from the piers, Mr. Channing bought a chainsaw and started carving. Early pieces included giant replicas of pencils, which he produced prolifically.

"Eventually I got the courage to take a couple of pieces down to a gallery in SoHo," he said. "I liked to bike around SoHo, so I saw what type of work was being shown."

His first show was at the O.K. Harris Gallery.

Mr. Channing has shown his work in numerous one-man and group shows since then, mostly in New York and on the East End, but also as far away as Switzerland.

Roots Exposed

His Bridgehampton property, though, still serves as his most welcoming gallery. Moving onto the property in 1977 was a wood hoarder's dream. Most of the trees cleared to make way for the house were saved, including the giant cherry tree.

"I collected an inventory of entire trees with roots and all the branches," Mr. Channing told his friend George Plimpton in an interview several years ago in The Paris Review, "and it was only a matter of a few minutes before I started thinking about hanging them upside down. It seems to me a very natural thing. I don't look at a tree as an object that necessarily has to be right side up. I'm just fascinated by them."

That fascination carries over into Mr. Channing's smaller, carved works. Much of the wood's natural form is left intact. Sometimes roots themselves make the piece - "roots are very provocative" - and other times they play a part, as in "Medusa Mask," a carved face with a system of roots sprouting forth and forming snakes.

Spheres In Pursuit

Another series depicts women's forms shrouded behind curtains that appear to blow against them. Lately, the sculptor has been interested in turning tree trunks into anthropomorphic columns. Last year's "Dryad in Tree," for instance, uses the natural curve of the tree toward its roots as the capital. The tree is halved and a dryad is carved in relief inside.

The giant green spheres, which turn their corner of the property into something that might have come from the movie "Sleeper," were more of a fluke. Mr. Channing had initially wanted to make the spheres self-propelled.

"I had this plan to have them roll around the property. I envisioned them popping out of the woods following people around."

A Sucker For Stumps

Mr. Channing has no problem getting wood now. He has his own stump dump of sorts on site. But that doesn't stop him from being obsessive from time to time.

After a major storm in 1988, he remembers passing the remnants of a giant oak tree that had been blown over in Sag Harbor. Most of it had been carted away, although a massive, six-ton stump remained. Unable to pass it up, Mr. Channing hired the farmer Clifford Foster to haul it to his property.

A year later he turned it into a sculpture of an "octopus and a sphinx in consort," a vision he saw in the tangled roots and trunk.

A Tree That Talks

Mr. Channing said he would like to have more time to devote to his sculpture. "It's a complicated cycle. I don't know what to do about it," he said. "There are a lot of artists who hold it against people who don't hurl themselves into the fiery pits and suffer."

At present, Mr. Channing is caught up in the wine business. Channing Daughters' 1995 merlot garnered a favorable response two weeks ago at a major industry tasting of Long Island wines in New York. Some local restaurants are eager to carry the wine once the label becomes official.

The bottle label, which carries a photo of Mr. Channing's beloved upside-down cherry tree, gives the bottle a quirkiness and individuality that reflects the sculptor, vintner, and investor behind it.